Wireless personal area networks (WPANs) provide wireless short-range connectivity for electronic devices such as audio/video devices within a home. The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) 802.15 High Rate Alternative PHY Task Group (TG3a) for WPAN is working to develop a higher speed physical (PHY) layer enhancement to IEEE proposed standard P802.15.3™—Draft Standard for Telecommunications and Information Exchange Between Systems (referred to herein as the proposed IEEE standard). Multi-Band Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (MB-OFDM) has been proposed for the IEEE standard due to its spectrally efficiency, inherent robustness against narrowband interference, and robustness to multi-path fading, which allows a receiver to capture multi-path energy more efficiently.
FIG. 1 illustrates the MB-UWB frequency spectrum. In MB-UWB, the UWB frequency spectrum, which covers 7.5 GHz in the 3.1 GHz to 10.6 GHz frequency band, is divided into 13 bands, which each occupy 528 MHz of bandwidth. Each band includes 128 sub-carriers of 4 MHz bandwidth. Information is transmitted using OFDM modulation on each band. MB-UWB may be coded such that information bits are interleaved across various bands to exploit frequency diversity and provide robustness against multi-path interference. MB-OFDM, however, does not offer sufficient frequency diversity for higher code rates. Typical techniques to increase frequency diversity in MB-OFDM systems often have a relatively high level of complexity, which adds to the cost of implementing such techniques.